Network bandwidth is increasing exponentially. However, the network infrastructure (including routers, servers, daemons, protocols, etc.) is still using relatively old technologies. As a result, Internet applications and network routers cannot keep up with the speed of the bandwidth increase. At the same time, more and more devices and applications are becoming network enabled. The load that these devices and applications put on the network nodes have increased tremendously. The increase of network load and number of applications also makes the complexity of implementing and maintaining network applications much higher. As a result, the increase of network bandwidth and the ubiquitous use of network devices and applications can cause problems for routing and transmission of data in the old network infrastructure, particular when publishing content to subscribers.
A model for having networks push information from servers to clients is the publish-subscribe style. In this model, the server becomes a simplified publisher of its information, without regard to which clients may be interested in that information or where they are located in the network. The clients become subscribers for information, with information delivered as it becomes available, potentially without regard to details about where in the network it was published. The network is then responsible for efficiently routing published information to subscribers, for matching information to active subscriptions, and for doing all of this in a way that is transparent to the publishers and subscribers.
Because the complexity of the server is greatly reduced in the publish-subscribe model, the distinction between a heavyweight server and a lightweight client can begin to disappear, or rather to merge into the notion of a peer that can be either publisher, or subscriber, or both. Numerous kinds of applications have a natural affinity for publish-subscribe-style interaction between peers. A common theme underlying many of these applications is that the information being published and subscribed for is in the form of events. For example, an investor buys or sells a stock, causing the price of the stock to change. A traffic incident occurs on a freeway, causing traffic on the freeway to back up. A security hole in a software system is discovered, causing a patch to be developed for the users of the software. A player fires a weapon in an Internet game, causing another player's avatar to die. All of these exemplary phenomena are events that are potentially of interest to large numbers of subscribers and can be propagated over a network to notify those subscribers that the events happened. An event is thus simply a self-contained, succinct piece of information about something potentially interesting that happened at some point in time at some place on the network.
Another example involves a scheduled broadcast, which has differing characteristics from applications involving only asynchronous events where the time of events is unpredictable and random. First, the event is scheduled to take place at a known time. Secondly, an event does not need to be a succinct piece of information. Instead, it could be a massive amount of data. Directing this massive load of data to the parts of the network where interested subscribers are found requires substantial server processing.
Typically the server or publisher performs the routing decisions for the network in order to instruct the network on where to send published content in the publish-subscribe model. The publisher stores the subscriptions for content that it publishes. Upon receiving or generating new content, the publisher compares the content with each of the subscriptions to identify any matches. If the content (event) satisfies any subscriptions, the publisher pushes the content to the corresponding subscriber via the network. This conventional publish-subscribe model places a tremendous burden on the publishers, particular as more devices become network-enabled and as the number of subscriptions increases. A complementary approach can be just as odious—a subscriber evaluates its own subscriptions on all published events.
With greater convergence of untold numbers of applications across the Internet, the possibilities for exploiting event notification become endless. However, those possibilities require a more efficient way to make routing decisions and determine when events satisfy subscriptions, alleviating the burden on the publishers. Thus, a pervasive, persistent event notification service could provide tremendous value-added benefit for Internet applications, as well as other applications and implementations.